


A Hard Rain

by smolhombre



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Frank Castle Doesn't Know How to Quit, Grief, Long, Mourning, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-06 13:08:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12818196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: When he starts over this time, Frank tries to mean it.An after; for people who don't believe in them, and who deserve them even less.





	1. 00. Black Branches

**00\. Black Branches**

Pete Castiglione takes his eggs over easy, when he has the morning off work and the time to make them, shaves with the Gillette Fusion Five razor, when he can be bothered, and his boots are a size thirteen, polished on Sundays along with the 9mm Blowing Llama he keeps at his bedside when it’s not tucked in his jeans. These are all the ways he is like Frank Castle. 

Frank has no real use for Pete Castiglione. Some days he’s close to hating him, except that he knows what real hate feels like. So Frank doesn’t hate Pete. Frank resents him, thinks he’s a coward and a liar and he wouldn’t piss in his mouth if his guts were on fire, but he lives with it. Frank is used to that, anyway. 

Pete works at a lumber mill as close to the upstate as Frank is willing to go, far enough Pete can call it “out of the city,” close enough Frank can smell the port water, if he’s still long enough. His bedsheets smell of sickly beech sap no matter that he washes them in straight bleach. He sleeps better in them than he has in years. Sometimes, anyway. He wakes up on those mornings meaner than a hornet’s nest and swallowing bile. 

Frank Castle has not earned that. Pete Castiglione definitely hasn’t. 

Pete hasn’t done much of anything in his life, short as it’s been, but Frank can forgive that. Pete can’t remember if Maria’s dark hair shone more gold or red in the light of their kitchen, though, and Frank won’t let that go.

Frank won’t. Frank refuses.

Pete can only smell Maria’s hand cream when he thinks about it. The sugary vanilla smell only lasts a second, even then, before Pete’s lost it. Frank has perched on rooftops for hours until that smell was the only real thing in Frank’s entire orbit, till even the weight of the rifle in his hands was gone.

Pete disrespects Frank’s wife, and that’s the problem. That’s the fucking kicker. Frank would have let Pete handle the pieces of his life that were left behind, after; Frank was tired, Frank would have taken the backseat. But Pete is a piece of shit for pulling this smoke out now, bleary eyed into the pink morning even four cups of coffee into it. 

Frank only tolerated puffs on someone else’s cigarette or the rare joint at the butt end of his worst tours, when he’d try anything to get a few moments relief from the monotony of blood caked in his hair and the stink of sweat and piss and the feel of sand under his nails. Pete joins the men at the mill for smoke breaks, more often than not. He keeps a pack tucked in the visor of his truck, and he’s started to smoke them on the way to work, just for something to do. 

It’s, perhaps, the biggest slight Frank can’t forgive Pete for. Maria’s parents both smoked two packs a day between them and she’d hated the smell, had the nose for it like a bloodhound. Frank had smoked half of Garrett’s Marlboro two and a half days before coming home, that last time —

That last time —

Before — 

— and she’d smelt it, at the airport, when he’d cupped his hands around the back of her skull, her hair stiff with hairspray and tugging against his knuckles. Smelt tobacco on his fingers as he’d sagged against her, too tired for more than two kisses to her mouth, one to the shell of her ear as she pulled back, poking him in the chest with one finger sharper than any knife Frank had ever handled. Frank Jr. had those, too; with elbows like weapons and very cold feet, same as Maria. Her eyes looked different, Frank remembers that. Some makeup, but he can’t remember if the lines around her thick eyelashes were blue or brown or —

She’d told him she’d divorce him on the spot the next time he came home with that shit on his mouth. He knew better, she said, hadn’t been away for long enough to forget. She meant it, she always meant what she said, but she was smiling, and her eyes were wet, and Frank pushed their foreheads together and said  _ yes ma’am _ until she lifted his bag and shoved it at his chest and told him she wasn’t sure if she would wait until they got home. Her shoulders were freckled with the sun. Frank was too tired to kiss them, too tired to promise her a trip even to the airport bathroom.

Later. Later. Always, he said he’d finish this later, fix the screen door later, he’d ask for a transfer later, he’d —

Pete sucks a deep, acrid breath in. Maria is dead.

He crushes the butt under the heel of his boot as he clambers out of his truck. Frank can’t remember if it was one hand or both that he’d used to hold Maria’s, when he brought it up to his mouth before slipping a ring on it.

* * *

 

_ What are you doing. What are you doing. What are you doing.  _

Going through the motions of an after Frank never thought to plan for himself. An after. Freedom. A life. This time, maybe, for good.

Nothing, really. 

The lumberyard is not bad. Most of the men Pete works with aren’t total assholes, and the foreman largely leaves them alone, as he views work as scheduled time to run around on his wife. Robbie’s wife packed Pete their leftovers almost every night, and they weren’t even bad. Pete isn’t asked to work too much overtime and the pay keeps him in an apartment cleaner and bigger than he knows what to do with.

Frank thinks it’s a cage. Pete could live with it. Maybe not forever, but for a while.

* * *

 

Even Pete can’t accept Robbie’s invitation for dinner, even the third time he offers. In his apartment, Frank eats Robbie’s wife’s leftovers cold to prove a point he can’t remember as he puts down the book the mill’s secretary let him borrow and decides to brave the newspaper. 

Pete’s a coward. With this, Frank has been, too. The paper feels so dry in his hands he expects it to crumble if he reads it too hard.

New vigilante, running around in green pajamas. He can’t help but sneer. Because that’s what everyone needs, another man in tights running around and stirring shit up.

Not Frank’s problem, of course. Certainly not Pete’s.

Still, he can only bear to skim it — not written by Karen; Pete feels like an ass for being relieved. Frank feels like — 

Frank hasn’t heard about Red in what feels, suddenly, like a very long time. He hadn’t thought to ask Karen about it, before. Pete shoves the thought away now as he throws the paper in the stack with the others.

There’s nothing that matters in any of them. There is nothing of the Liebermans. There is nothing of Rawlins. Billy is mentioned in passing, though most of the news focuses on Lewis, who the news can make into anything they need to sell their papers. Frank doesn’t bother reading anything with his name in it, though Pete is sometimes tempted.

He should throw them out. There’s a recycling bin our front, even. Plastics and papers and cans that the girls living above him go out to sort through, sometimes, smiling even as they dug through garbage in a way Frank can’t understand.

Pete rinses his fork and Robbie’s tupperware in his sink, his eyes on the stack of papers. 

Frank Jr. was the artist between them, but he and Lisa both had made Frank a paper mache dog for his last birthday. Lisa, always a perfectionist — ( _ just like you, Frank, she can’t stop once she gets started on something. I swear, she drives Frankie and I nuts when you’re away _ ) —  spent so long sculpting it that they hadn’t had time to paint it, really, except a few spots, and Frank remembers the headline along its back was about aliens in New York. Lisa had run around like Thor for weeks after the sky had split open, Frank Jr. playing Hawkeye or Captain America depending on what Lisa pushed him into. She was wearing her little cape when they gave the dog to him, twisting fistfulls of it in her little hands as she waited for his reaction.

Frank Jr. had nudged Frank’s arm with the dog’s hollow nose and said, smiling, wouldn’t it be nice if this were a real dog. “Frank the Third,” he’d giggled, his left incisor a small gap Frank often pretended to grab like he could pull out the tooth still growing behind the gum. “That sounds good, Daddy, doesn’t it?”

* * *

 

Frank hurts for so long the lack of physical pain is a phantom limb. He swings his axe and hefts the chainsaw and feels weak like he’s never been, even as he fills out shirts so the top button won’t close and he eats more than he has in years. Pete works no less than ten hours a day, but Frank has never felt lazier.

_ What are you doing. What are you doing. What are you doing. _

Living. This is living, after. 

Curtis calls Pete, and Curtis also calls Frank, and he’s clearly relieved to hear either of them. Frank owes Curtis, Frank loves Curtis, and he doesn’t ever let Curtis think he’s dead. But he’s not alive, maybe, like he used to be. He drives home from work with the radio off, the trees lining the two lane out to the lumber yard breaching the very bright sky, and can’t say if Pete is, either.

* * *

 

He returns the book to the mill’s secretary. It was okay, Frank thinks, though he doesn’t like a lot of non-fiction. It’s hardly in her hand before she starts digging through one of her drawers. She offers him another with a smirk, clearly expecting him to refuse.

“Heard a lot about this one,” Frank says carefully, weighing it in his hands. He is very careful to keep Pete’s expression placid.

“You aren’t alive in the twenty-first century if you haven’t read it,” Lakeisha confirms solemnly. “The movie even won an Oscar.”

He raises an eyebrow, holding  _ Fifty Shades of Grey _ aloft and sure he needs no words to express his feelings about that. She spreads her hands out. “I wasn’t on the committee.”

Pete flips through the pages idly, just to fill the room with a little noise. Frank does not hate Pete, but that nervous tic is starting to inch him close.

“It’s not so bad, really. I mean it is bad. But hate-reading is a thing.”

He snorts. “Really looking forward to it now —”

Pete remembers, suddenly, that he’s held this book before; the memory so visceral he’s ashamed he forgot. How could this not be the first thing he thought of?

“I got my wife this book, you know,” he blurts. “Before my third tour, I said — said she’d need something to keep her company, till I got back.”

Maria had laughed so hard she’d spilled her beer down her front, then on the book itself as she’d tried to put them both on their low coffee table. Frank watched the bob of her throat as she looked up the stairs, listening for any noise before climbing onto his lap. Her hair was cut shorter than she liked it and she was wearing one of his shirts, the collar loose and littered with more than a few holes. She kissed at the spot under Frank’s jaw that got her anything she wanted — new wallpaper, a trip to the shoe store she loved when they were just supposed to be out for groceries — and he’d carried her up the stairs. He was nearly late to the airport the next morning, and while he was away Maria would sometimes cut out pages or passages of the book and shove them in his cards and letters, full of notes and doodles. 

Pete falters, looking down at Lakeisha’s soft, open face. “You aren’t going to report me for harassment for that, right? I got half my shift left, is all.”

“ _ I _ gave  _ you  _ the book,” she smiles, gentle like how Lisa looked at Frank Jr. when he would sprawl on their couch, head in the cushions, feet nearly on the floor and snoring like a chainsaw. “I served, too,” she continues, very carefully. “Air Force. Broke my collarbone in a training exercise and got discharged.”

“...Marine, ma’am,” Pete grunts finally, though it feels like a lie. He taps the book on the counter. “I don’t mean to keep you. Thanks, Lakeisha. Ma’am.”

Pete is out the door before Frank can really keep the hot bile from rising in his throat. He shoves the book in his lunch box, unable to look at it for several days.

* * *

 

Pete does end up recycling the papers. Karen’s e-mail address and office number are stamped underneath each one of her articles. It’s not the one Frank remembers.

As he fixes himself coffee in the breakroom that morning, Frank sees Foggy Nelson on the news, standing in front of Luke Cage. His hair is short, his suit is expensive. Luke looks bored, staring out over his head into the crowd of reporters. 

Pete whistles lowly over the lip of his coffee cup.

Well, huh.

* * *

 

“Some shit, huh?”

Pete looks up, a cigarette clenched in his teeth and sweat stinging his eyes. Robbie is five years older but looks at least ten. He takes his creamer with a little coffee and heaps of agave syrup, and Pete can smell the sweetness in it from several feet away. Robbie treats it like a health food, trying to squeeze the stuff into Pete’s cup at any given turn. His gold tooth shines a bit as he gestures toward the radio Jeff has perched nearby.

“ _ — authorities claim a copy-cat bomber is responsible for the explosives set off earlier today at local newspaper offices —“ _

Frank fumbles the grip on his axe.

“  _ — the  _ Midtown Pulse  _ and the  _ Daily Bugle _.  _ Midtown Pulse _ only just resumed operations after losing longtime investor and controlling partner Wilson Fisk, who was indicted on seventeen counts of criminal — “ _

“World is shit, isn’t it?” Jeff huffs, wiping at his forehead. He doesn’t talk a lot, so whenever he deigns to it sounds more significant than it usually is. Frank doesn’t that’s the worst problem the man could have. 

Pete grunts in response. Robbie downs the rest of his coffee.

The  _ Pulse _ . The  _ Bugle _ . Not Karen. Not Frank’s problem. He swings his axe and tunes the rest of it out.

* * *

 

_ What are you doing. What are you doing. What are you doing. _

Pete finishes the second to last chapter before bed. He sets it down on his bedside table, reaching for his phone to check his alarm. Pete has grown out of a lot of Frank’s Marine habits; rising naturally at the crack of dawn chief among them.

He sets it, then catches a look at the date. 

Tomorrow is Lisa’s birthday. 

Frank vomits until it’s nothing but blood, and even all the remaining bleach in his apartment won’t take out the stain from the bowl.

* * *

 

“I didn’t even think about it until it was almost here, Curt.”

“You remembered, Frank. What else are you supposed to do?”

* * *

 

Pete Castiglione takes his eggs over easy, when he has the morning off work and the time to make them, shaves with the Gillette Fusion Five razor, when he can be bothered, and his boots are a size thirteen, polished on Sundays along with the 9mm Blowing Llama he keeps at his bedside when it’s not tucked in his jeans. These are all the ways he is like Frank Castle. 

Frank Castle works at a lumber mill still mostly in the city. He takes his coffee black. His wife and children are dead, and he smokes sometimes and reads all the books people think to let him borrow, even if he hates them. These are all the ways he’s like Pete Castiglione.

* * *

 

People don’t recognize him more often than not, though Frank stopped being surprised by that a long time ago. At the gas station he gets his smokes and fills his truck up at, he catches a few wide-eyed glances. Sometimes he looks at Robbie and thinks he knows. But no one does anything. No one comes. Frank Castle is a free man.

_ Though I have to wonder what freedom means to a man like you _ .

Ten hour work days. Leftovers from someone else’s wife. Very occasionally, a book he doesn’t roll his eyes at.

Living — breathing, eating, the smell of dirt and chopped wood. The absence of doing. Resting, if this is what rest is supposed to feel like. 

Freedom, for Frank, is mostly a lot of waiting.

* * *

 

The humidity in the main office swelters with cloying sap and the ripeness of very green trees. Lakeisha has two fans droning away on her desk, her hair a haphazard pile on her head as she arches her swanlike neck to catch their humming breezes. She smiles at Pete as he enters, and he returns it without having to think much about it.

“Ma’am.”

“Hey Pete. You liking that last book you borrowed?”

“Whole lot of illicit material in it,” he drawls, leaning on the desk with his forearms. “Your parents know you read that stuff?”

“Short of my browser history, I’m an open book, even with my parents.”

He taps his knuckles on the desk. “I don’t doubt it. You’re a good girl.”

Lakeisha’s expression puckers as she twists one of her small braids around her slim fingers. “Why do you always have to make it sappy, Pete?”

He bites the inside of his cheek to keep his smile down. “I ain’t finished the book yet, if that's what this is about.”

“Gotta re-read some parts, do you?”

“Now you’re just making fun of an old man who can’t read. That what you summoned me in here for? Rag on me?”

“Don’t gotta call you in here for that. I can use the PA system,” She jerks her chin at the phone in front of her. “Phone for you. Says it’s a family emergency.”

Pete freezes. Frank licks his lips and looks up to the windows on either side of the desk, refusing to glance behind him at the only door. 

_ What are you doing. What are you doing. What are you doing _ .

“Did they say who?”

“Hm? Donnie or Daniel or something. You alright?”

Pete does not want to answer the phone. Frank is not surprised. Pete does want Lakeisha to stop looking up at him with her brow pinched like it is. Pete doesn’t want to know. Frank itches for it. Frank has been waiting, perhaps, for something to finally go wrong. Neither of them are sure who picks up the receiver, in the end. 

“...David.”

“Oh, sweet butter roasted Christ, Frank. I thought you were gonna brood and ghost me, you —”

“David.”

“Look, man, I haven’t bothered you and I don’t want to now, but I gotta. Russo’s out, man. He’s out. He’s out, Frank, and they can’t find him.  _ I _ can’t find him.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“Oh, don’t be an  _ ass _ , Frank.”

Did David really think Billy would stay in custody? Pete scrapes a bit of dirt out from underneath his thumbnail. Frank is cataloging the pieces he has hidden away at home. He looks up to the clock and back. Billy wouldn’t come for Frank until he made a show of it. Frank doesn’t care either way.

“You shocked by this, David?”

“I just said,  _ do not be an ass _ , and yet you insist on it! Why!”

Pete swallows, looks down at Lakeisha. “David.”

“No. No. Do not tell me no, Frank, I’m —”

‘You need to calm down.”

“He  _ knows _ about my  _ family _ .”

“You know who to call,” Pete says tightly. “Not me. Not me.”

* * *

 

David calls Pete’s cell phone until Frank rips the battery out, melting the sim card over his lighter while laid flat on his squidgy mattress. He calls the mill again the next morning, presumably the second Lakeisha opens the office.

Frank picks up the receiver only to immediately hang it back up as soon as she calls him in. 

“Thing is, ma’am,” Frank huffs, handing  _ Fifty Shades of Grey  _ back over to her, “I don’t talk much to the guy. Disagreement, way back. Thought when he called yesterday it was something actually, you know. Important. So —”

“You want me to block his number?” Lakeisha asks lightly, settling the book in her purse under the desk.

“He doesn’t take hints. I don’t want you to think you have to keep answering.”

Lakeisha hums noncommittally. Frank nods. She doesn’t owe him anything, of course. 

“Well, you...you have a nice day, ma’am.”

She doesn’t speak until he’s turning the door to leave. “You know if you need anything —”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Thank you.”

* * *

 

Frank spills his coffee and smokes two cigarettes before even leaving for work the next day.

David’s face looks up at him balefully from the front page of the  _ Bulletin _ . 

**TREASON, CORRUPTION, HEROISM: A Three Part** **_BULLETIN_ ** **Exclusive**

_ I have to wonder what freedom means to a man like you. _

Frank does not need to look below the subheading to know, but he does anyway. Karen’s name is the feeling of sweaty, soft hair against his mouth, maybe just dreaming it. A shaking hand, the smell of something sweet and green.

Freedom is waiting. Even Pete, maybe, was coming to think so.

_ What are you doing. What are you doing. What are you doing. _

Frank Castle collapses onto his mattress, one boot on, and reads.


	2. 01. Blue Eyed Son

_**01\. Blue-Eyed Son** _

Billy Russo dies in the park, surrounded by painted horses and the only man he ever came close to giving a damn about, save himself. Thousands of little mirrors saw him on the way out, twinkling in the strung lights overhead like they were glad to see him off.

He was carried out; his dead body, his heavy bones, his weeping flesh. They would not let him have the lights from his mirrors or the polished shine of the floor the horses pounded against with their glued-together hooves. Billy, maybe, would have liked to stay. A painted horse among his own.

Yet he didn’t fight, when they carried him off. He breathed in when they told him to, allowed wet sponges on his brow even when the murky water clouded his spotty vision, opened wide for pills and needles and the occasional gloved finger, swallowing the powdery taste of latex when they were done until a new body bloomed under these strange, prying hands.

A new body, each cell something to discover. Could he extend some feeling to his pinkie toes, if he dared? If he had the energy, could he run his tongue along the new shape of his mouth? He felt a fingernail once, when he was able to clench his fist in a loose ball. Were they the same shape as before? How much did they change under the surgical white lights?

Billy Russo died that night. Whatever sack of flesh he left behind is dead, and whatever bits they pieced together, old and new or borrowed and bought, is a whole new man.

Well. He can’t help a look in the fuzzy reflection from the television screen across from his bed, a kingdom to itself. “Whole” new might be a stretch. There’s gaping holes yet still to fill; but even when he was Billy Russo, was that not the case? They could be anything. He could make them anything. That’s freedom, that’s living. He is ready to be alive.

Formerly Billy blinks his new eyes, one better than the other though both unburdened with the weight of eyelashes, as the nurse asks him if he’d like something more to drink.

Twice. _Yes_.

He can’t wink yet, but he’s working on it.

Once, in a tent in a place Not Billy can’t remember, he’d cupped water and blue Gatorade into someone’s mouth like this, their face pulpy and swollen as they bled red salt into the cup.

He accepts the water the nurse brings back in her wrinkled hands, cradled like a styrofoam bird with a neon bendy straw poking out for him to kiss. He sips it gently with his new, tender mouth; the coolness shocking on his sensitive gums, icy in the store-bought tightness of his throat, not yet stretched out or broken in. He nearly feels like smiling. In the desert, it was hard to sit on the man’s bunk. It was a waste; Billy had known the man was going to die.That bunk was eventually pushed up so Billy and Frank could toss cards between them without having to bend in half like slips of paper to draw from the deck. Still, it could have been done sooner, and without all that extra cleaning.

But this is not a waste. He’s not dying. He’s alive. He is living.

The nurse could look a little happier about it.

* * *

 

There is a clicking noise that sounds in his new ears like thunderclaps. It comes and comes and doesn’t stop.

His new eyelids are nice, as most everything on him is. They drape velvet from his sockets, since grown out of their perpetual dry itch, rich and very heavy with morphine from the IV drop he feels pinching in his new arm, hollow as a bird’s. Countless thunderclaps later, he manages to pry them open. Slits of light hit him first like little atom bombs, a violation on his retinas — they close again, he starts from zero. Slower. Slower.

A man sits half turned away from his bed, a puzzle splayed on the small table that’s been pushed between Not Billy’s bed and the television. _Judge Judy_ is on, the volume turned very low. Not muted, though. He can feel the suggestion of noise humming up the skin of his arms, tingling at his scalp, his temples. He wishes the stranger would turn it up or off completely.

The stranger looks over as if he has called for their attention. “How are you feeling?”

He blinks once.

The man is dressed well enough, clean but plain. He was in the military like Billy Russo was; whatever blood still in his body from Billy’s old one pulls forward in the wondrous cage of his skin, like to like.

“I told Rawlins he was going about this all wrong.” The man looks a little sad. Has anyone looked at him like that before? Surely not. For whatever reason, no one was as thrilled to see him alive as he himself was. Billy, maybe, got this look when he was very young. Was he supposed to do something, when another person looked at him this way?

He blinks twice.

“Yes. I know you’re hurting.”

He looks at the IV still in his bird-arm, the mannequin limb with no feeling in it. He remembers pain like he remembers Billy Russo. He has hurt. He has been Billy. He is neither of them now.

He looks back up. Blinks once.

The man wears a collared shirt. His suit jacket, navy and pressed, hangs over the back of the hospital chair like an offering, perhaps a concession. _Look, I am weak too. I am vulnerable, just like you. I have no armor._

The stranger digs in his jacket pocket before he pulls out a needle, shaking three different pills out of an unmarked bottle, all different colors.

Oh.

He blinks once.

Once.

Once.

The stranger slides the needle into the port on his IV. Billy Russo is dead, yet still it’s Billy Russo that screams, distant and soft from a deep crater in his brain as the stranger pushes down the syringe hammer. Perhaps not all of him was as new as he thought.

Gently used. A trade in. A stain still, on an upholstered seat, but the shine on the front —

“I’m Kozlov, son. I’ll be here when you wake up. I’m excited to work with you.”

He believes Kozlov, not that it makes any difference. He sees red before he sees black, and he wakes knowing he has died again.

* * *

 

A list. Karen published a list. Frank’s stomach is empty and twisting and heavy. Frank’s stomach is a creature unto itself that wants to escape the prison of his body. Frank himself is a creature that would like to escape the prison of his body.

She can’t let things lie, Frank feels (unjustly or otherwise) that he knows that better than anyone. But.

He doesn’t recognize most of the names, but he knows they are mostly, probably true. He also recognizes that the list is nowhere near complete, not long enough by even a quarter. An eighth. He runs his thumb over the barely raised ink on the page. A sixteenth.

His coffee is cold when he takes a sip. Pete forces himself to drink it, to not waste. He’d gotten regular Folgers at the store, not even off-brand, because Pete is soft and believes there is a difference. It burns his throat despite its temperature; he thinks the ink would taste better.

The list itself is mostly right, but Frank could wipe his ass with the rest of what David has fed her. Half-truths and cobweb-thin fibs and all that cowardly shit that checks out but only just; only true to someone who wasn't there to know to check for more. Little seeds of the past, almondy slivers of fact littered in with a lot of elaboration that was just a way for David to wave his shit-stirring hands at Frank, grab him by the balls through the paper and demand: _“Asshole, I am not finished with you yet!”_

Pete folds the paper back up, tossing it away from his person. The list still looks up from the page, visible even when folded. A good thing, to sell a paper. Frank’s mouth is a thin line.

Not even a drop in the sour red ocean.

But David had gotten these names, and spread them, to put Frank exactly where he is now. The rest of it doesn’t have to be right. The list is what’s most easily checked, the list is what fucks them over.

Frank went to Sarah. David went to Karen.

When he got the first call in the diner, Frank figured was bound to kill David, one day, for one reason or another.

* * *

 

The raise Karen receives at the _Bulletin_ after leaving Nelson and Murdock (“the raise” being that she now receives any actual money with any regularity for her time and services) affords her an apartment nicer than she ever expected to land herself in. She’s even got money still left over for takeout (sometimes), coffee at The Grindhouse (most mornings), and even unnecessary things (every now and then), like the painting she buys from a lank-haired woman in the subway; fat white roses and dollops of little green buds against a red backdrop so rich the paint still looks wet, hanging now opposite the tiny window in her living room.

It is home, now, the first one she’s had since dropping her old life and starting a new one. It’s lovely, and hers, and nothing next to Trish Walker’s penthouse.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Trish greets her, smiling in her doorway like a magazine advertisement. She bounces up to the balls of her bare feet to press her soft cheek to Karen’s before waving her in. The foyer is lit with a candle that Karen can only describe as smelling “expensive,” the inlaid lights overhead dimmed in favor of the early afternoon light pouring in from the large windows. Plush, open, clean; it’s not Karen’s home, but she feels immediately comfortable in the tasteful lived-in-ness of it regardless.

“No, no. It sounded important, and I had a staff meeting to wiggle out of anyway. Ellison’s ready to go to war over the coffee rations in the breakroom, and I’m not in the mood to see any of the interns cry today.”

Trish snorts, falling onto one of her overstuffed ivory couches before waving Karen to the one opposite. It is more comfortable than a lot of the beds Karen has slept in over the course of her life.

“My producer and Ellison should duke it out in a locked room somewhere,” Trish smirks, toying with the light, sheer scarf around her neck. “Last week he pitched mandatory quiet time in the office to cut down on ‘unnecessary chatter.’ It’s like he forgot we work in radio, all we do is chatter. Did you want anything to drink, by the way? I’m sorry I didn’t ask before.”

“Am I gonna need it?” Karen asks honestly. Trish bites the inside of her cheek, and Karen can’t help but sit straighter. Interior design magazine ambience and easy charm or otherwise, it was strange of her to call. “Is everything...okay? I mean, I haven’t heard from you since — well. Is this about a story? Is Jessica okay?”

“She told me not to bother you,” Trish says after a moment, not quite able to look Karen in the eye as she twists one of the rings on her fingers. “When we left the precinct, after I got your number. I didn’t get to tell you then, but. I’m sorry. Jessica won’t say, really, but — I know you lost someone.”

Oh.

Karen shifts in her seat, digging around in her purse just for the sake of something to do. The further down in the bag she gets, surely, the closer her composure will be. Just a few more seconds, past this lipstick, past this pen, a few seconds more it buys her to push a tampon out of the way, a broken hair clip, to school her face  —

She manages a tight smile as she clips half of her hair up. It pinches terribly with its broken hinge. “It’s alright. Not your fault. Not mine. If anything, you know, I think it’s how he wanted it to go.”

Not a lie. Still a painful truth, still a little ice in her chest that won’t thaw. Resentment, fury, something even uglier; something Karen would call relief, maybe, if it weren’t saddled with all that guilt. She clears her throat when Trish makes no move to speak again, her expression too open and too sad to be looking at Karen, who is absolutely fine. “It’s really fine. I’m fine. Really.”

“...Right,” Trish says softly. “Okay. Then I guess I should just start, right? Well. I saw your article this morning about David Lieberman, and it made me think that maybe we could help each other.”

“Help each other how?”

“You said he discovered illegal heroin smuggling in Afghanistan, right? And that money funded —”

“A kill squad, yes,” Karen says tightly. She does not smell black coffee and gun polish when she says it, the buzz of shorn hair warm against her palm, her tongue heavy in her mouth with blood and useless, small things she doesn’t say.

“But for what?” Trish pulls a file out from underneath one of the couch cushions. “Those targets weren’t random. They — they had the go ahead to kill people without going through this hoop, right? If they were Al-Qaeda or whoever, they wouldn’t have needed to go around their ass to get to their elbow to take them out. It was something specific. They were after specific people.”

“And you...you think you know who?”

“I do.” Trish makes a visible decision to hand the folder over. “I found this in my mother’s things. These...these people paid for Jessica’s medical bills, after the accident. I have a lot of their files; apparently they tried to get in touch with her more than once, but my mother wouldn’t pass the letters along. Afraid they’d take her away and we’d lose the good publicity.” Trish takes a deep breath, and Karen attempts to look like she doesn’t see Trish wipe a little blood away from her palm where her fingernails dug into the skin too hard. “Anyway. When I read your article, I thought something about it sounded familiar and I went looking. I saw a name in here I think you’ll recognize. The...one of the doctors who signed off on Jessica’s discharge was on the list you published; one of the men F— Operation Cerberus killed. ”

Karen is very still on the couch. She had first met David Lieberman for coffee at Pete’s Diner, all done up in red and yellow checks and faux vintage vinyl floors. Sweat stuck her thighs to the seat as the A/C overhead made a lot of noise and pumped out very little air. They stayed there for four hours, the first time, and each time since that they’ve met Karen has been struck by the absurdity of discussing treason over the sticky formica tabletop while Roy Orbison croons in the background. But it seems suddenly very reasonable, compared to sitting in Trish Walker’s expensive taste and holding a manila folder in her hands with the letters **IGH** stamped over top of it.

“Why would they want him dead, though? He’s just a doctor.”

Trish doesn’t say anything, but there’s something familiar in the clench of her jaw. Karen does her best to not look too interested until some of Trish’s hackles lower.

“You read about her, when Kilgrave died,” Trish finally manages, each word agonizingly careful.

“Brett told me she destroyed one of his interrogation rooms with her bare hands,” Karen says baldly, trying for a little smile. “But yes, I did also read about it.”

“She wasn’t always like — couldn’t always do that, Karen.”

Trish’s eyes are green as a spring leaf and very steady as they gauge Karen’s reaction. Karen can only do her best to not rip the file in half in her eagerness to open it.

* * *

 

_David Lieberman lived as a dead man before he was allowed to live as a free one._

Frank has folded and unfolded the paper in his hands so much the ink has rubbed off along the seams, but the first sentence of Karen’s article is still in tact. The third time he read it, he couldn’t help but think it was funny despite himself. She was good at her job, not that he didn’t know before. It was exactly the kind of shit people would get hooked into reading.

The windows in his apartment are open, his kitchen flooded with so much light Frank reads the article again mostly by memory rather than sight, propped against the counter while the sink drips idly beside him. He has to fix the faucet every third day or so, but this time he hasn’t gotten around to it yet. He has, for the first time he can remember at any job, called in sick to work.

His bags are by the door, but Pete hasn’t decided if he’s leaving.

* * *

 

If he is not quite Billy Russo leaving the mirrors and the lights in the park, he is not quite someone else, either.

Kozlov stays. When he leaves, Nearly Billy goes with him. It is a good decision. He can shave by himself in a week, even if it’s sloppy, can read the papers in four and a half days, even if the names and pictures in them are mostly meaningless and he sometimes has to squint in the very very dark.

When David Lieberman looks up at him from the _Bulletin_ two and a half weeks out from his abandoned kingdom in the hospital, there’s a ringing in his ears that he can’t place. The words in the article slip like water through his fingers and the foggy, still healing crevasses in his brain not patched over with Kozlov’s help. _I know you, who are you, I know you, why do you know my name._

* * *

 

The Grindhouse has decent enough coffee, but Karen goes there mostly for the view. Her table is always free due to its perpetually wobbling leg, but Karen knows how to ignore it. It’s still in better shape than the desk Foggy picked up off the street for her in their old office. Her table here has the perfect view of the door, the window looking out onto the street, and is only a few feet from the bathroom which has a window Karen could squeeze out of, if she had to.

Not that she expects to. But she could.

By and large the people who would have cared to track her down in public have lost interest in her or most likely died, but Karen thinks it’s good to keep in the habit. She only does it for her personal safety, of course, and not because of any irrational closeness it makes her feel to —

Karen didn’t ask to take the file from Trish, partly because Trish promised there were more of them and she wanted to build enough trust that Trish would invite her back, but also because she very much doubted that Trish would let her.

She did, however, take pictures as Trish busied herself making what were objectively the best lattes in the known universe. The machine on her kitchen counter had more buttons, bells, and whistles than Karen’s computer, which kept Trish busy enough while Karen snapped photos of as many pages as she dared. Whatever guilt had twinged in her belly as she’d hastily put her phone back in her pocket vanished as she spent the rest of the afternoon in Trish’s swanky living room. Karen left with the distinct impression it’s exactly what Trish would have done in her place.

Karen doesn’t bother to fight to keep her handwriting neat, least of all legible, against the wobbling table as she begins her notes, the other hand searching on her phone’s browser.

IGH — they’d paid for Jessica Jones’ medical bills, but Karen finds no records of them being registered as a nonprofit. They have no website, and Karen finds no physical street address on any of the papers or the internet. The newspaper articles she digs up about Jessica’s accident say her family hit a dairy truck, and the farms she finds near the area don’t list IGH or any of the individual names on the papers as investors or owners on their articles of incorporation, even to mention them on their Facebook pages in passing as employee of the month.

The files themselves are largely hospital invoices; the balance on all of them is zero, and if Karen didn’t know better, didn’t have a feeling of wrongness in her gut, she’d think it was mundane enough. IGH sent the paid invoices to show that they’d handled it...for whatever reason that they handled it.

But why had they?

And the releasing doctor, Sayed Dostum — how had he gone from an emergency room in a New York suburb to a U.S. kill list in Kandahar?

Karen orders another cup of coffee from the waitress passing by, her stomach a knot.

Did it ever end? She had told him it had to, though she was the one still digging. But it’s not like she could deny him the truth, either, if she could find it. Surely, this was what they both needed. She takes the coffee blindly from the waitress when she returns, a yawning hole in her stomach so big she doesn’t hear her phone ring until the third chime.

“Hello?”

“You write poetry now, instead of the news? That’s how a novel should start.”

Karen wants to choke on the coffee, too bitter and too hot, too familiar now in her hands. His voice should be closer, should rumble somewhere like hot coals on her skin, the noise a brand. He shouldn’t be calling at all.

“Frank.”

“Should I read the one tomorrow?”

She wipes some of the spilled coffee off of her notes, grimacing at the smeared ink it leaves in its wake. “I dunno. Do you usually read the paper?”

“Just when I see you waving a red flag at a bull.”

“Frank, it’s my job. I — I want to know about it, and I think more people should know about what they made...people deserve to know.  And if it wasn’t me who wrote it, David would have gone somewhere else, to someone who wouldn’t p— someone who doesn’t know you.”

Something shuffles on the other end of the line. “He wouldn’t have. And you don’t need to know anything else about them, Karen. I’m. I’m done with it, I did what I had to. So did you. You told me — ”

“Don’t, Frank.”

_You have never been done with anything in your entire life._ Karen sets the mug down, unable to not cast a wary look around the cafe. Frank never lies to her. Sometimes his truths are just the ones she doesn’t want to hear.

“Karen? Alright?”

She looks at the notes in front of her. She could ask about them. She should. _Do you remember putting a bullet in Sayed Dostum? Was it clean like the one David had on video, or was he beaten to death? Did you use the electroshocks David mentioned you used on Fazel Atmani, did you —_

“How are you, Frank?”

A sigh, on the other line, broken up even before she has to listen for it underneath the noise of The Grindhouse. “Does it matter?”

A different icy twist behind her breastbone. “Would I be asking if it didn’t?”

Frank breathes in, short and sharp. He still doesn’t answer immediately. “No, Karen. Guess you wouldn’t.” She waits, watching the lights overhead reflect off her coffee. She could be anywhere, and so could he. Most of the places they could be, they aren’t together. “I’m fine. Just want a heads up, if I need one. And I wanted to warn you off of this, though I know it won’t do me any damn good.”

“If you needed one, I would have already told you,” Karen says, and she doesn’t flinch at all. _Do you think I’d publish something so you would need it?_ “You worried people will read something that won’t make them scared of you?”

“Lieberman and I did shit people should be scared of. The shit you’re writing should scare _you_. If he told you otherwise, you’re putting a lie out there. Sounds like bad business, in your line of work.”

“You fixed his garbage disposal. Terrifying. A creature of the night.”

“Gotta be honest, PUNISHER DOES CHORES doesn’t have that flashy ring to it your line this morning did.”

Karen’s coffee is colder than she likes it, but she forces a gulp down. She doesn’t lie to Frank, and Frank doesn’t lie to her, but this conversation is veering too close to dishonesty. Karen won’t let them ruin this one good thing.

“I told you I want— I told you it was important to me, that you have something after. I would have been crazy to not give David a chance to talk about it, when he came to me. Rawlins wasn’t the only one running things here, I know it. He couldn’t have been. And maybe this helps round up the rest of them who were responsible, and this is how he — this is how David and I help you, maybe. But...I wouldn’t ruin that for you. Your life, now; I wouldn’t ruin it for this.”

Frank grunts. “I had to ask, Karen. I don’t know what all David spun for you, trying to get me to come back.”

“What?”

Frank has the gall to sound — surprised? Disappointed? “Karen, come on. You’re smart. Smarter than anyone I know. You think he came to you for his fifteen minutes? You think he wanted to do the Right Thing? He gave up on that the first time they killed him, Karen.”

Karen’s knuckles are bone white on the phone. Behind her eyelids, David Lieberman twitches in his seat at the little clang of silverware on their table, won’t meet her eyes except when she soothes him first like a spooked horse. After living on the run, Karen didn’t expect much else.

But he did come to her, months after the fact and seemingly out of the blue. Maybe his nerves were from something else. Why _hadn’t_ she thought of that? “Why does he want you back, Frank?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Then you wouldn’t have _mentioned it_. Wherever you are, you aren’t here —”

“Don’t matter where I am, I —”

“So if I need to protect myself —”

Frank’s laugh is sharp and bitter. “Now you give a shit about that? Half that shit he told you was a _lie_ , he was baiting me —”

“With _what_?” She hisses.

“What do you think?”

_“Sorry if this brings anything, uh. Up. But I thought I could trust — trust you. He did, so. Trusted you a lot more than I thought he knew how. Can I buy you a coffee? Just so we can talk? If it’s too...I understand, if you don’t want to talk about him.”_

Son of a _bitch_.

Karen slams her cup down hard enough the coffee sloshes out and onto her notes, her skirt, her trembling hands.

“Didn’t think about that, did you?”

“Why would I, Frank?” Karen snaps. He’s never sounded this way before, though Karen can’t place what, exactly, is different. “What would make me think that?”

“Don’t,” he grunts. “Don’t do that. Not to me. I’m not those idiot lawyers and I ain’t your puffed up boss. Cut the shit.”

Karen pats at the spilled coffee aggressively, saying nothing even as the waitress tops her off.

* * *

 

_“I just thought…‘I’m doing the right thing,’” Lieberman manages, cracking his knuckles in a now familiar nervous tic. Not for the first time, even after the posthumous revelations about William Rawlins and his Operation Cerberus, Lieberman sounds like he’s waiting for someone to  challenge his story. “I thought, ‘I’m doing the right thing, but I’m being punished, and my family wouldn’t ever know.’ My wife, Sarah, she had to watch me go over that bridge because these people get to make the rules what they want. They don’t lose sleep over right and wrong. But I had to. My wife had to. My kids did.”_

_Lieberman’s story continues tomorrow, with part two of the_ Bulletin’s _three-part exclusive:_ **TREASON, CORRUPTION, HEROISM** , _a study of an American Hero._

 

_Inquiries about this story can be directed to:_

**KAREN PAGE, Jr. Investigative Reporter**

[ k.e.page@nybulletin.com ](mailto:k.e.page@nybulletin.com)

(845) 937-6540

* * *

 

David Lieberman is a hero. Karen even likes him. Despite everything, he did nothing Karen herself wouldn’t do. Removed from The Grindhouse and without the weighty rumble of Frank’s voice in her ear, she can admit that.

She finishes editing her article with the lights off in her office, the custodian’s vacuum a groaning hum in the hall. Ellison had taken so much convincing of the change Karen doesn’t think three bottles of wine could take the edge off her budding migraine. She hits “save” with a weary, soul-deep “ _Fuck it_.”

She’s unsure who the article is really, ultimately, written for, much less who it’s about.

* * *

 

The bags stay. Frank doesn’t.

* * *

 

Karen picks up the biggest pair of sunglasses the gas station has to offer, sweeping her hair up off her face only as she enters the hospital’s automatic doors. Saturday morning crests so early behind her its pinkness is still black around the edges.

“I need to speak with the administrator on duty,” she sniffs to the receptionist. Twenty years old if he’s a day, he looks up at Karen with heavy bags under his puffy, bloodshot eyes. He takes a slow swig from his visibly flat Mountain Dew before speaking, a clearly uninterested drone.

“Is there a problem, ma’am?”

“I’m filing a malpractice suit against one of your d—”

The receptionist cuts her off with a groan. “Wait here, please.”

As he shuffles off, the baby blue of his scrubs rustling down the fluorescent yellow lights of the hall, Karen hears a string of swears from his mouth Foggy would be proud of.

* * *

 

“Say, why are you only junior reporter?”

Karen looks up so suddenly she gets a crick in her neck.

It’s jasmine, that Trish’s expensive candle actually smells like. Printed on the label in raised black ink: Jasmine and Geranium, whatever those two are actually supposed to smell like in real life. It’s lovely enough Karen would like one herself just to say she has something so nice, but she wouldn’t dare ask where Trish got it lest she be burdened with the knowledge of its price. She knows she wouldn’t ever burn it anyway.

It doesn’t stop her thinking it’s lovely. Karen takes a deep breath of its sweet, clean floral and answers honestly with the truths she’s comfortable sharing.

“I’ve not been there long enough to earn seniority,” Karen shrugs, looking back down at the files spread on Trish’s coffee table.

“You’re the only one who publishes the real heavy pieces, though,” Trish says carefully. The line of Karen’s back locks up like someone is winding a key from behind. “It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done something unorthodox on your behalf. They hired you having not ever written before, I mean.”

Ben wore Calvin Klein Eternity; Karen saw his wife cradle a half empty bottle of it at the service in her gloved hands. Karen smells it now over the perfumed candle, warm on the collar of Ben’s jacket as she’d flung her arms around him in relief, buried deep in the upholstered seats of the car she sold for scraps after finding the Blacksmith.

“I’m not the senior reporter, and I don’t deserve to be.” Karen takes a drink from the coffee Trish offered her earlier. “What has you asking?”

Trish gnaws at her lip. “Jessica asked, yesterday, what I was doing, and I — I’m sorry. I mentioned you came over. We don’t lie to each — I don’t lie to her, I mean. She’s got...reasonable trust issues. If you find her lurking somewhere, it’s nothing personal.”

Karen doesn’t particularly care if Jessica wants to waste her time following Karen home to watch her tweeze her eyebrows and drink a beer before bed so long as she can continue looking at the IGH files. Better yet, from what she’s heard about Jessica’s temperament and abilities, she’d probably be good for the spooks David has brought into Karen’s orbit, and that makes it easy to feign a gracious enough response.

“I understand. It’s alright.”

Trish sucks on her teeth. “She also went digging immediately — protective, sorry. She mentioned something about...about a Ben Ullrich?”

She takes it back. Jessica can go fuck herself.

“I don’t know why you bothered asking if you already knew.”

“Sorry.”

Karen squints up at Trish’s backlit silhouette and makes herself believe what she says. “Ben died because of Wilson Fisk. Not me. If Jessica is such a good PI, maybe she would have figured that out.”

Trish frowns, pink splotching her wide, high cheeks. “She’s just being a friend. I told you she’s been through a lot.”

“That doesn’t make it my fault.”

“...No,” Trish hums, having the decency to look down at the ground even as her hands remain firm at her hips. “And I’m sorry. Seems like you keep losing people.”

It’s a dig, Karen feels it for what it is. But Trish wants to know about IGH as much as Karen does, and she doesn’t make her leave.

“Look, the doctor didn’t have anything on the internet I could find. No blog, no care reviews. The only thing I found was his diploma from the hospital Jessica was admitted to.”

“How did you get ahold of it?”

Karen shrugs. “Said I was a former patient considering a malpractice suit, and that he and his lawyer were refusing to provide documentation of his credentials, which lead me to believe the hospital was also complicit in the scam.”

Trish grabs both of their coffee cups and walks them back to her kitchen for a refill. “They don’t know he’s dead?”

“Must not read the paper,” Karen smiles thinly. “Lots of people don’t. Anyway. Now that I have this I can make the trip up, unless you found anything here we should look at first?”

“Since we have the alma mater for Dostum, maybe we can search their commencement lists online and see if any of the other names were in his class?”

Trish gives her a loose one armed hug when she leaves. Karen thinks they are friends, now.

* * *

 

Mostly Billy re-learns the prickling burn of anger reading the newspaper. He re-learns chewing the inside of his cheek until copper blooms underneath the grind of his teeth, he remembers the rhythm of cracking his knuckles, one after the other, again and again in a mindless beat.

His brow is a tight, heavy knot as he tosses the paper down. The craters in his brain are pooling meaning and words together like puzzle pieces or magnets, slow but with a certainty Mostly Billy has missed. He already knows a hundred things he doesn’t like, a hundred things he does. David Lieberman. Dislike. Strawberry Ice Cream. Like. Scratchy tags on the back of his shirt. Dislike. The smell of fabric softener — the bottle says lilac, he thinks that’s probably a flower. Like. Karen Page. Dislike.

He is learning, and in releasing the inside of his cheek, licking a little blood from his gums as he tosses the newspaper aside, he feels more like himself than he has in months.

* * *

 

_Dear_ Bulletin _readers,_

 

_We value the trust you place in our reporting. I, personally, value your trust and work to report the news I believe needs to be shared in the most timely, accurate, and clear way possible._

_Yesterday I published part one of a series called “TREASON, CORRUPTION, HEROISM: A Study of an American Hero.” Today, instead of publishing the second part of this series, I publish this letter instead. The_ Bulletin _won’t be continuing this story._

_David Lieberman suffered at the hands of his fellow citizens. His story is true. He suffered unimaginably. His family deserves our respect, and our apologies. Because of Operation Cerberus, countless others have suffered unimaginably; it is likely we will never even know all of their names, much less their stories. The families of those named and unnamed in yesterday’s article deserve our respect, and our apologies._

_But this story isn’t meant to be told just yet. Not in full, and not to us. Under the advisement of our legal team, representatives from several national agencies, and the collective conscience of our editorial staff, we are pulling this series until further notice. In doing so, we hope to give the appropriate agencies the space they need to conduct further investigations into Mr. Lieberman’s claims, ensuring all responsible parties are held accountable for their parts in these crimes._

_I value all of the feedback I’ve received since publishing yesterday’s article. With your support and input, I look forward to continuing our ongoing conversation about accountability, transparency, and legal and moral boundaries._

 

_Inquiries can be directed to:_

**KAREN PAGE, Jr. Investigative Reporter**

[ k.e.page@nybulletin.com ](mailto:k.e.page@nybulletin.com)

(845) 937-6540

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Feedback is always appreciated :) 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://violetteacup.tumblr.com) if you want to talk Punisher feels!

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to talk Punisher, lets talk about it. This is part fix it for the bits I didn't like, part season two dream fic because I need more already.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Feedback is appreciated more than I could possibly say. 
> 
> Title and chapter headings each from "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" by Bob Dylan.


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